


En Italie, il n'y a que des vrais hommes

by thedevilchicken



Category: Talented Mr Ripley (1999)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-23
Updated: 2010-12-23
Packaged: 2017-10-13 23:59:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,456
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/143111
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thedevilchicken/pseuds/thedevilchicken





	En Italie, il n'y a que des vrais hommes

**Author's Note:**

  * For [s_k](https://archiveofourown.org/users/s_k/gifts).



Peter never believed in true love.

***

He’d never exactly been rich, though he supposed by most worldly standards he’d never been poor either. He was a son of a son of a son of some kind of excessively minor aristocracy, the kind that had let the family’s meagre riches slip through the cracks in their veneer of nobility long ago and consequently sold off the tumbledown manor house. He’d looked into it once upon a time, back at school in a time that seemed so long ago; a couple of hours in the local library one afternoon then an ill-advised jaunt into the countryside on an old bus that made his teeth rattle on the dismal, broken country roads, and then there he’d been. They’d turned the old manse into an orphanage. Sometimes he felt he might have been happier growing up there.

The Smith-Kingsleys had never quite forgotten those noble roots, it seemed, in one way or another. Tea and scones on the lawn were gone by the time Peter was born, of course, but they’d found themselves moderately well-to-do once his father’s father had made some money in textiles or steel or whatever it was that his grandmother had talked about sometimes when he’d been to visit her. The convalescent home where she’d lived since her husband’s death had always made Peter uncomfortable but he’d loved his grandmother dearly; they called it Alzheimer’s disease those times when she barely remembered him, when she talked to him as if it were his namesake sitting there - the Peter Smith-Kingsley she’d married before the war, not the child of her child. She’d been an actress then, quite famous out in those peculiarly British pockets of India before she’d fallen for the visiting businessman. She was beautiful. Peter supposed she’d been beautiful until the day she’d died, in her pearls and rings and her kind, happy smile. Perhaps he thought her crazy to hold on to a thread of what she called love until the bitterest end, but he knew she’d been the best of them all.

For ten years she’d been the only one left in the family who’d spare a moment for Peter. In a way, he supposed he didn’t blame them; he’d always known who his parents were, after all, who they’d raised his brother and sisters to be: the last vestige of a once faintly noble line whose reputation was sullied beyond repair when the chambermaid told half of the servants of half of polite society that she’d found the youngest Smith-Kingsley in bed with a man. Hypocrites to the end, his parents had known all along, only cared when their friends had word of it from their servants. He’d shamed them all, they said when they cut him off penniless. He’d been surprised how fiery he’d felt at those words. He’d expected a dull grey cloud of resignation.

For the first time in his life, he’d had to work. He left Oxford once the money was gone and went to work for a newspaper, freelance, just snippets of stories that made up employment that he was always uncomfortably aware was a gift from an old friend from school. Some kind of tenuous sense of honour amongst Old Etonians kept him from the breadline even at his worst, which seemed bizarre when he thought back to the disgust he’d felt when his parents had sent him away to school. They’d said something about family tradition and all those hours of Latin and Greek that would stand him in good stead for the future. It had turned out to be an interesting experience, though likely not for the reasons his parents had thought.

Like so many boys, his first sticky fumbles had been there at school. Fifteen the first time, awkward and almost ashamed; seventeen when fumbling turned into something just a little more. Jerry was a prefect, king of the Eton Game, intelligent, disarming; Peter, then that bookish kind of popular, found his company stimulating. He found it so right up until the moment they left the college for university, past the summer spent on the Dorset coast with Jerry’s generous family. They parted with a smile, a surreptitious kiss by the wishing well behind the thatched cottage. Jerry wrote letters; Peter didn’t keep in touch.

The articles didn’t last. He moved on, reviews and then travel notes, trains over Europe, reading Oscar Wilde in French cafés like the quintessential gay British cliché. Somewhere along the way he forgot the name of the man he was so punished for touching, forgot his face, forgot his hands, forgot the way it felt to touch him. He thought one day he might forget how it felt to leave his home, no regret for it but such pervasive disappointment. But in Paris he met Marge Sherwood and he knew that in that old friend of his older sister’s he would have a close and constant reminder of that old life and because of that he ceased to linger on it. He adored her, in the purest sense of the word; she treasured him, like a brother she’d never had, like the friend she’d waited a lifetime to find. And his adoration could only grow brighter when she brought him Tom Ripley.

Tom believed in love. You need only be in the same room as Tom Ripley and you’d know it; there was romance in him, a deep vein of it running through him, bleeding into every other part until it mingled with everything he was. But Peter didn’t believe in true love, just the laws of attraction, chemistry, a shared moment, the memory that would fade in time. They stood together, shoulders just a hair’s breadth apart, the backs of their hands brushing with that little thrill of electricity. Peter showed him the Campanile and the Piazza San Marco from above, bought him coffee by the Rialto Bridge and talked to him about music as they watched the sun set over the Grand Canal. They crossed the Bridge of Sighs hand in hand, breathless from their stolen kisses. Tom’s fingertips pressed warm to his palm as they shared snatched sidelong glance after glance. Peter saw their reflection in the water below and for a moment he just couldn’t breathe for it.

Italy had to it a permanence that seemed to bother Peter but that utterly enchanted Tom. There was a book of photographs on Marge’s table, great statues, Roman monuments, the Sistine Chapel, pretty Botticelli angels; Tom pored over it, let a smile quirk the corners of his mouth as he explained every piece and Peter let him though he already knew. Tom let him kiss his neck, press his lips in a long line down his spine as he lay on the bed, as he sat at the piano, as they talked about all the places Tom wanted to go and that Peter could write about. Peter always smiled at that and nuzzled Tom’s perfect hair, the nape of his neck, where he could practically smell the sun that had never even touched Tom before Italy.

Venice, though: Venice with its vast canals, the buildings swallowed piece by piece, was a city in decay. In Venice, there was only the shade of permanence beneath the stone and the gilt and the grandeur; Peter knew it couldn’t last.

They were going away, he told himself. They were leaving Italy and the wreck that was Marge who told him again and again that she needed time to heal and she’d do that at home, or at least beneath the hot Italian sun. They were heading away, to somewhere, to anywhere, the destination of that last-minute cruise ship just the first step in a voyage that could take them anywhere they wanted to go. Tom wanted to go so many places. Peter would teach him, and all he wanted in return was a flash of that self-conscious smile. Tom loved life, loved knowledge, loved Peter, loved love.

Then hands at his throat, hot, too hot. Tom’s weight against him, Tom’s weight crushing against him, Tom’s breath hitching with desperate despair as Peter felt a kind of final frailty creeping through him. Not a game now. Not smiles and fingertips and the perfect freckled stretch of Tom’s body beneath his palms. Tom’s languid, reverent touches were nowhere to be found.

In his final moments, he was sure his heart broke.

***

Peter never believed in love; through his whole life it was just attraction and chemistry, moments that would fade in time. But the memory of Tom Ripley would never fade. There would never be another memory after him.

He never believed in love. Not until it was far too late.


End file.
